The Power of Limits

This book, "The Power of Limits" is one that I've read and studied since about the mid eighties.  I found just now a link to someone's blog with a real nice writeup about the book, and how it affects us:
http://riskplaycreate.wordpress.com/2011/05/17/art-and-the-power-of-limits/


I also recommend the page at the publishers:
http://www.shambhala.com/html/catalog/items/isbn/978-1-59030-259-0.cfm

The simple restrictions that the universe puts on all of us (Metaphysicians, read Binah/Saturn), that we rail so against, are the source of all beauty.

I just picked up a new Native American Flute.  I've been playing these for 40 years now.  They never cease to calm and caress me.  The simple 5 note scale, which is the child of the same mathematics put forth in "The Power of Limits", is a delicious pill to swallow, for an ex avante-garde composer.  I used to deal in complexities, but now I deal in "simple gifts". 

These beautiful simplicities are what we deal in every day in music and sonic resonance work.  When we expose ourselves to simple overtones and musical resonances,  they have profound healing impact on our nervous systems, and our overall health in general. 

The Prizim is another very simple instrument; it's close cousin, the autoharp, has been called the "Idiot Zither" for years... and due to it's "overly simple" mechanism, it's been passed over and laughed at by musical society at large...thus it is much like The Fool in Tarot.  The butt of everyone's jokes, the target of everyone's mockery.  The Fool, in this guise, is the Village Idiot.  And the Autoharp has long been the V. I. of the music world.  Those of us who play it seriously have developed complexes when around "real musicians".  You'd be surprised how it's spurned, even at acoustic folk and country music festivals...most folks there don't even know what it is, which is amazing, because both of the first families of recorded country music, the Carter Family and the Stonemans, were centered around the Autoharp.  The Autoharp was the most popular parlour instrument of the late 1800s and early 1900s, and it outsold guitar sales untill the 1950s.  But does anyone know what it is, this "lowly autoharp?"  Nope.  They disregard it, as the ignorant often will the simple.  The Prizim is an advance that moves the autoharp into the realm where "real musicians" (pardon my sarcastic terminology, AH players...) will take an interest, because it plays many many more chords than the autoharp.)  True, it makes it all a little less simple.  My main point here has been about the Autoharp, it's similarity to The Fool, and what a simple gift it is.  It's really true that the learned are ignorant, and the simple are blessed beyond high degree, having secrets that the "grown up" world knows little of. 

It's for this reason that the Fool in the Tarot deck I am designing is playing an Autoharp:

(Yes, those are Donkey Ears...and note the little otters in the corner...they're looking at him and saying "what an idiot!")



The Power of Limits...'tis a gift to be simple!